Community Music Pack

Community Music Pack v1.0

Welcome to the first release of the community Music Pack! This project was inspired by the great work done by the Community Expansion Pack (CEP) and Community Tileset Pack (CTP)teams.

The CMP is a compilation of 235 of the finest community contributed music. Artists range from gaming industry professionals to community aspiring composers with music from classical to contemporary. The goal is to provide a broad foundation of content for builders to use and players to enjoy.


Happy listening!

Tiberius_Morguhn



31-Aug-06 UPDATE : CMP_Credits.zip updated to reflect two music files that were removed from the CMP but not updated in the list


01-Sep-06 UPDATE : CMP_hak.zip added that just contains the cmp.hak file. This is for players that have not or do not wish to download the CMP but want to play a module or in a PW that uses the CMP (music files not present in ambientmusic.2da are ignored by the NWN engine).


02-Sep-06 UPDATE : Added mus_cmp143.bmu to downloads. This is a fix for the "screech" corruption in that file as reported by several posters. Please copy this version over the one installed from the CMP 1.0 release.
CMP_Credits.zip was also updated to reflect CMP file names and add some missing credits.


02-Sep-06 UPDATE : CMP_Credits.zip updated again to reflect several rows of data that was deleted from the 02-Sep update.


05-Sep-06 UPDATE : Added mus_cmp266.bmu to downloads. This is a fix for the initial "screech" corruption in that file. Please copy this version over the one installed from the CMP 1.0 release.


13-Jul-08 UPDATE : Updated to Bioware patch 1.69. The cmp.hak file which contains the updated 1.69 ambientmusic.2da file was uploaded as CMP_hak_169.zip. Also, the CMP_Credits.zip was updated with an additional file that sorts the contributions by title to match the toolset (per a community member request). Builders - please read my shoutbox comment below in regards to several tracks having to move "position" to accomodate the new Bioware music additions.

We have an interview tonight with Tiberius_Morguhn to learn more about the "Community Music Pack (CMP)" that he's put together in an effort to give both players and module builders a single package of high quality music created by the leading music creators from the community. Topics include his background, the CMP itself, what's in it, how to use it, thoughts on Neverwinter Nights 2 and more.- Sept. 10th 2006

1) Could you give us some background on yourself?

I am a 34 year old electrical engineer who has enjoyed playing D&D since I was in middle school (6th to 8th grade here in the US). I got started with the red Basic book boxed set, then the blue Expert book boxed set, then finally moved into the AD&D realm with the 1st edition rules and kept going. I haven't played in a pen and paper campaign since 2000 when I moved to Atlanta, GA and got married. I still buy most of the AD&D books though :) I have been playing computer games for about as long with the Commodore PET (cassette tape data storage) being my first real computer gaming machine followed by a Xerox machine capable of running DOS (Zork or Adventure anyone?). Neverwinter Nights was the first game for me to stretch the boundaries with a very intuitive toolkit, and the rest has been history.

2) You've recently released the "Community Music Pack (CMP)". Could you tell us more on what it's about?

Sure. I had been confining myself to making various bits of custom content, mainly placeables and some creatures. I noticed that in many pieces of custom content or modules, authors would include small collections of music to go along with their various work. I also noticed that many of these pieces of music were the same so it struck me that no one had tried to capture all the great music selections on the Neverwinter Nights Vault into one cohesive pack. Since the CEP and CTP had succeeded with doing the same for placeable, creatures, and tilesets, one of the last things missing was music. So, in essence, the CMP is just a collection of some of the best music the community has to offer available in one convenient download.

3) What are some of the work you've included in the package?

It is a collection of about 50% community artists who have produced original work specifically for Neverwinter Nights and the other 50% is from industry professional artists who produced music for other games (eg. Baldur's Gate) that was made freely available from the publisher. There is a full CMP_Credits.htm file that details the source and artist for each piece in the CMP. I encourage users of the CMP who like a particular piece to contact the artist if possible and thank them and/or vote for their work on the Neverwinter Vault.

4) What made you come up with the idea to do this?

The main impetus to do this was my own need. I like to have variety when I am cobbling together various areas in the NWN toolset. The CEP provides a good foundation for that in regards to placeables, character parts, and creatures. The CTP will provide the same for tilesets. There was no such collection for music. I also saw a lot of repetitive downloads of the same music that authors would put as a dowload to play their module or integrate into their tileset which could have been avoided if there was a community pack to draw upon. Hence, the CMP was born.

5) What does a module author have to do to use your package?

It is a relatively painless two step process. Unzip the CMP package, placing the .hak file (only one) in the NWN Hak folder and place the 235 .bmu files in the NWN Music folder. Within the module, add the .hak file (cmp.hak) to the module's custom content at the top of the custom content list and you're done. When selecting an area's properties, the ambient Day and Night music options will now have the 235 additional CMP music selections to choose from.

6) And on the other side of the coin, what does a player have to do to take advantage of the CMP?

For players, it is the exact same as the module authors. They have to unzip the .hak and .bmu files to their respective places. Their work ends there though. To play a CMP enabled module, the player is done at this point. There is also another option, in that I have made the cmp.hak file available as a separate download. A player not wishing to have to download 383MB of music to play a module can simply download the cmp.hak file and place it in the NWN Hak folder. The player can then play the module but will not hear any CMP music the author may have used in various areas.

7) How did you go about deciding what music to include?

I started with the highest ranked music files as voted on the Neverwinter Nights Vault by the community. I then branched out to include other works by the same set of artists who had ranked high in the voting. This provided about 50% of the CMP right off the bat. The rest of the works were taken from freely available music from games in the same genre as NWN (Baldur's Gate, Ultima 7, etc.). I tried to include a good variety to cover the many settings and time periods availabe in the NWN toolset. To limit the scope of the initial release, I did however exclude working on any battle music - only day and night ambient pieces were worked on.

8) How did the respective authors say when you told them about your project?

The ones I could contact were enthusiastic about the project. With NWN being 4 years old, many of the original artists who posted their work have moved on to other games or real life pursuits and were not able to be contacted.

9) How long did it take you to put this whole project together?

From start to finish, I worked on it about 6 weeks. This included file selection, listening, and correspondence with the various artists if possible. It also included correspondence and guidance from Maximus of the Neverwinter Nights Vault to avoid any copyright snafus. A complete rework was done in the last week once I found some better tools to do batch re sequencing of the files to normalize volume, bitrate, sampling rate, etc.

10) Are you working on any projects or modules?

I have a few more custom content placeables and creatures in the works that have been sitting unfinished for a while. I have 3 modules that I tinker on almost nightly, but may or may not see publishing. Of course, the CMP has a few more releases to go!

11) What's your thoughts on NWN2? Do you plan to make it work there as well when it comes out?

I am interested in NWN2 and hope it is a worthy successor to NWN1 from the custom content perspective. I hope that the music system in NWN2 still uses the BMU format and follows the same method of implementation (ambientmusic.2da) so it can be ported over quickly. Otherwise, I'll just have to wait and see once it comes out.

12) Anything else you'd like to say?

Yes, after the first release of the CMP, I was contacted by a group of other custom content developers from the CTP project team. They had been discussing since May the idea of doing a "CMP like" project but had not gotten anything concrete assembled at that point. After some diplomacy, we came to the conclusion to join our teams together to work on CMP v1.5 and other future releases. These are enthusiastic and dedicated folks who want to continue to add great custom content to NWN and I am looking forward to pooling our collective resources together to make the CMP even better. SO STAY TUNED FOR THE NEXT GREAT RELEASE OF THE CMP FROM THE CMP PROJECT TEAM!!!